With the release of Tedin the UK this week, I promptly went in search of bear-related retro games (as you do). The thought of playing Wally Bear & The NO! Gang On the NES again proving to be too much of a hassle, I settled on Hanna-Barbera’s golden bear himself: Yogi.

Ah good old Yogi.

Never a fan of the show myself, I nevertheless occasionally watched it back in the day. It was mindless, plotless and repetitive but hey, it was a cartoon and it was on TV. I was a kid, what was I meant to do? NOT watch it? Focus on homework?

Also because this is one of the Batman games I played the most growing up, both on the Genesis and on the Sega Master System, so I thought I’d take another look and see if they still hold up as well as I think they do today.

Believe it or not, growing up I played very few Spider-Man games. It’s not like there weren’t loads of them but somehow I only ended up trying out one game per console.

The one I remember particularly well is The Amazing Spider-Man vs The Kingpin on the Genesis which pretty much revived my faith in there ever being a good Spider-Man game. Before that, I’d played The Amazing Spider-Man on Game Boy and Spider-Man vs The Kingpin on the Sega Master System. Both of which failed to really interest me.

Abraham Lincoln may very well have been a vampire hunter but it’s unlikely he’d be a match for Dracula. Especially not Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you don’t want to get on Gary Oldman’s bad side: crazy things happen.

Yes today we’re looking at a vampiric entry: Bram Stoker’s Dracula on the Sega Master System, a console I knew all too well growing up. Francis Ford Coppola’s film too “scary” for me to really watch all the way through, this game was my only shot at getting a taste of Bram Stoker’s vision… except for the book, which I would have read as a kid if it had been made of candy or had controllers attached to it.

You go nuts trying to find a game weird enough, obscure enough and relevant enough that it’s both interesting to talk about and ties in nicely to a recent movie release, and when something finally pops up you end up regretting ever opening that Pandora’s box.

Damn youSnow White & The Huntsman for making me hunt down the only Snow White retro game I could find: Snow White: Happily EverAfter on the Super Nintendo.

The rare game is based not on the 1937 Disney classic but on the 1993 unofficial sequel by Filmation, whose theatrical release prior to that was BraveStarr: The Legend(lol). Filmation actually closed down a year later, the film being the equivalent of suicide for animation studios it seems. So how do you celebrate a movie that’s not very good?

Truthfully I don’t remember that many Alien games from my own childhood. I remember Alien 3, on the Genesis, which was a vast improvement on previous versions of the game: better gameplay, better graphics (Ripley has *gasp* boobs!), kickass music, blood, gore… great stuff. The game goes for more of an Aliens-type balls-to-the-wall run of destruction and death rather than the dark, gritty, clinical atmosphere of David Fincher’s film; it works, and makes for one thrilling action-packed game. One thing that always bothered me in the Sega Master System version was how you freed prisoners by essentially picking them up and putting them in your pocket (they disappeared as you walked passed them), here you actually set them free. I know, it’s insignificant, but I felt like a douche going around vanishing these guys off the face of the Earth.

With Joss Whedon’s Marvel Avengers Assemble still fresh in our minds, why not take a look back at a game which brought Marvel’s titanic superteam to life in 16 bit form and made my personal Sega Mega Drive game collection that little bit more special?

The early 90’s didn’t have much in the way of kickass Avenger-ey things and, strangely enough, that soporific Captain America movie just didn’t cut it so you can imagine how much fun it was to play a game like Captain America & The Avengers.